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Aubrey has everything to set the bobbysoxers yowling—good looks, bubbling personality and a pleasing tenor voice. He also has much to commend him to his elders—quiet attire, reserved manner and a “sensible” hairstyle devoid of flamboyant sideburns.

This is due in large measure, I think, to considered grooming by his mentor, veteran song-and-dance man Wally Petersen, who “discovered” 23-year-old Aubrey a few months ago when he overheard him warbling in the bathroom of a Hillbrow flat.

I probed Aubrey’s background when I met him in Wally’s company one recent morning over coffee—and found him to be a man of varied talents.

“I left school when I was barely out of the grades,” he informed me with easy confidence. “I was only 14 years old, but I had to get a job to help along the family’s finances. I became a cinema projectionist, a skill at which I became fully qualified at the age of 21. But, between whiles, I dabbled with window-dressing and sign-writing and attended the Witwatersrand Technical College art school.”

“I was a projectionist at the Empire for a couple of years, and it was while I was working the spots for the Tommy Trinder show, ‘You Lucky People,’ that I first thought of a stage career.”

“I was auditioned for a singing role and promptly accepted. But the theatre management couldn’t spare me to go on tour with the company—and that was that. Then we screened ‘The Great Caruso.’ I saw it 68 times. Mario Lanza instilled in me a love for opera. I now have 175 Caruso recordings and 20 complete operas on record and on tape.”

“At a time when I was playing around as a tank gunner in the I.L.H.—I served in the regiment for more than five years altogether—I got the chance to appear in ‘Oliver!’ at the Brook Theatre. I was the undertaker’s assistant, and I toured South Africa and Rhodesia with the company.”

“Then Joan Brickhill and Louis Burke brought ‘Oklahoma!’ up from Durban. They remembered me from ‘Oliver!’ and signed me for the chorus. That was followed by ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Alexander, ‘The Enchanted Prince’ (I was a leprechaun) at the Children’s Theatre and a couple of PACT shows. And all the while I was keeping up my painting—getting a useful income from the sale of oils and sketches and designing the posters for the shows I appeared in.”

“Along the way I composed a love ballad which I often include in my repertoire. It is a plaintive, lonely song.”

Then came the chance meeting with Wally—and his emergence as a teenage heart throb. “The rock stuff,” interjected Wally, one of the evergreen Petersen Brothers, at this stage, “is on the way out. The youngsters are finding an appreciation for melody and lyrics that are intelligible.”

As for Aubrey? “I am determined to become an opera star,” he said emphatically.

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